TEACHING ONLINE PROJECT FOR ECONOMIC MATHEMATICS: A TEN YEARS PROJECT. HISTORY AND EVOLUTION

TEOREMA (Teaching Online pRoject for Economic MAthematics, http://teorema.cilea.it), a tool for self-learning of basic mathematics necessary to access to Faculties of Economics was born in 2000 and is a full production service since 2002. It has been developed by CILEA, (Lombard inter-university consortium for automatic computation), in collaboration with some Mathematics’ Professors from all Lombard Faculties of Economics. Thanks to TEOREMA, students with difficulties in mathematics can autonomously recover knowledge and skills not yet own, before starting their University’s studies. Besides TEOREMA contents make explicit to students mathematical prerequisites necessary for a faculty, like Economics. Actually, in TEOREMA e-learning platform, are enrolled about 2000 freshmen of different Universities. In these ten years of life, TEOREMA has constantly evolved. Firstly, TEOREMA contents are constantly monitored by users. The Scientific Committee approves the corrections then they are made in the platform. Furthermore, TEOREMA has a modular structure which is extended each year with new modules. The modules included are: logic, sets, real numbers, elementary algebra, equations and inequalities, analytical geometry, trigonometry and functions. Three other modules are being added: combinatorial analysis and probability, statistics and informatics.In order to anticipate the shortcomings’ recovery by the students before the university, over the years, CILEA, the TEOREMA Scientific Committee and some secondary schools have created various forms of cooperation and TxR (TEOREMA for the Recovery of Mathematics) arises in 2007, with the support of the School Office for Lombardy of Ministry of Education. TxR project is an innovative teaching tool that aims to provide mathematics teachers the opportunity to plan alternative strategies that increase the effectiveness of remedial courses, as also advocated by the current provisions law. During the TxR’s first year, a monitoring group of Lombard Schools, that have used TEOREMA for the debits’ recovery, has been established in order to correct and update the contents the instructions for use. Since the 2008, TxR is operative and available to secondary schools along with other forms of action prepared by the schools.Moreover, in those years, some Spanish universities have shown interest in TEOREMA and some collaborations were born allowing a process of internationalization of the project, its translation in English and Spanish and an experimental use of TEOREMA as math’s pre-course of the University of Zaragoza.A pilot with TEOREMA contents in multilingual format has been realised within PilotFAD, a CILEA project funded by the Milan’s Town Council. The resulted platform is navigable in three languages - English, Italian and Spanish - and the transition from one language to another for didactic contents is contextual to the language chosen for the platform. From the PilotFAD project, CILEA has decided to offer in Italy too the use of these translated contents (re-validated by the Scientific Committee of TEOREMA), in order to support the study of mathematics by not mother tongue Italian students.In conclusion, TEOREMA is a project of mathematics now stabilized in the structure, strong in the relevance of the contents, constantly monitored by the user community and extendible both in contents and in partnerships. If there is anyone interested to participate in enlarging the project, come forward!